Why Choose a Two-Year Laptop Refresh Cycle?

Employees need to be equipped with the right technology to succeed in an increasingly remote and dynamic work environment. This isn’t something that happens as a one-and-done event during onboarding. Instead, you need to continually ensure that your employees’ technology remains up-to-date so that they remain productive, engaged, and also protected from security and data threats.

One of the most effective ways to set up your employees for remote work success is to adopt a two-year laptop refresh cycle.

Two-year refreshes improve productivity.

When businesses adopt two-year laptop refresh cycles, they demonstrate a commitment to maximizing their employees’ productivity. Employees are only as productive as the technology that is powering their work. Laptops are designed with fixed obsolescence and even planned failure periods. That means that laptops are perpetually susceptible to crashes and system downtimes that can derail employees’ work.  

The likelihood of laptop failure increases after a machine is two years old. It’s estimated that one in three laptops fail within three years. By being proactive and adopting two-year refresh cycles, you can ensure that your workers remain productive and are not hamstrung by the inevitable crashes, downtime, and other system woes that become more frequent after two years.

Research released by Intel Corporation shows that organizations that deploy new systems on a two-year refresh cycle realize significant productivity gains—these gains are especially great for engineers and web programmers (Table 1).

Table 1: Average productivity improvement by role due to adopting a current-generation device versus a two-year-old one.

These productivity gains positively impact your bottom line and translate into positive ROI (Table 2).

Table 2: Average ROI by role due to adopting a current-generation device versus a two-year-old one.

By maximizing productivity, minimizing the need for security patches and updates that can be costly and also throw a wrench in employees’ productivity, and reducing the need for help desk support—which becomes more and more challenging in a remote world—a two-year refresh cycle can positively impact your bottom line.

Two-year refreshes boost morale.

The benefits of a two-year refresh cycle extend beyond productivity. Being equipped with up-to-date technology is a crucial driver of employee engagement and morale. More than half (57%) of employees say that working with outdated technology moderately or majorly affects their job satisfaction. You can’t afford to provide less-than-delightful employee experiences, especially as three in ten employees say they would likely look for a new job due to their workplace's outdated technology.

By adopting a two-year refresh cycle, you demonstrate your commitment to ensuring that your employees are empowered to do their best work. In doing so, you are also unshackling them from the pains of needing to deal with failed devices and wasting precious time troubleshooting or returning failed, outdated laptops.

Two-year refreshes protect against threats.

Finally, a two-year refresh cycle offers a key antidote against security and data threats. Security threats and data loss become more likely with each passing year of a laptop’s life. A typical laptop experiences a staggering 30 security incidents in its first year, and this climbs steadily as systems age. As an implication, resolving security issues in a three-year laptop costs 14% more than doing the same for a two-year laptop.

A few years ago, the optimal laptop refresh cycle was believed to be three years. But, today, amid the rising cost of security breaches (including the resulting damage to your company’s reputation), as well as the increased prevalence of security threats, opting for a two-year cycle is more important than ever before.

Firstbase and HaaS

Firstbase enables the world’s leading businesses to make remote work incredible for their employees across the globe. Firstbase offers a complete HaaS solution for managing the remote employee experience lifecycle, including hardware subscriptions that optimize cash flow and an easy-to-use SaaS platform that helps employers efficiently deploy, maintain, and refresh the physical equipment needed to enable great work from anywhere.

All of this means that implementing a two-year laptop refresh cycle is streamlined and painless. Firstbase reduces obstacles and automates workflows across HR, IT, facilities, and finance in one platform, so that organizations can adapt to the remote and hybrid work reality, and thrive in dynamic business environments. In choosing two-year refreshes, and pairing this with a HaaS model, you are prioritizing your employees’ productivity, and engagement, while also protecting them—and your business—from security and data breaches.

Learn more or request a demo today.